Bazel workshop made public

3 July 2025 Mark Karpov, Johan Herland

The materials from a Bazel workshop we developed for a client are now publicly available

• build-systems
• bazel

As part of our consulting business we are often invited to solve problems that our clients cannot tackle on their own. It is not uncommon for us to collaborate with a client for extended periods of time; during which, many opportunities for knowledge transfer present themselves, be it in the form of documentation, discussions, or indeed, when the client finds it desirable, in the form of specialized workshops.

In this post we’d like to talk about a workshop that we developed and delivered (so far) five times to different groups of people at the same client. We received positive feedback for it and we believe it was helpful for those who attended it.

The workshop intends to give a principled introduction to the Bazel build system for people who have little or no knowledge of Bazel, but who are software developers and have used a build system before. It is definitely a workshop for a technical audience, and as such it was presented to (among others) dedicated DevOps and DevX teams of the client.

We are happy to announce that the materials of this workshop are now publicly available in the form of:

• the git repository of the example project that we use in the exercises https://github.com/tweag/bazel-workshop-2024 and
• the accompanying slides.

The original intended duration of the workshop was three days. However, one of these days was dedicated almost entirely to a case study that we cannot share publicly; therefore, the public version is shorter and should amount to approximately two days.

Here are a couple of the introductory slides to give you an impression of the scope, structure, and expected knowledge in this workshop:

It must be pointed out that the workshop was developed in 2024, when the WORKSPACE-based approach to dependency management was still the default choice and so, given that we were time-constrained both at the authoring and presentation stages, we chose not to cover Bzlmod. We are still convinced that familiarity with WORKSPACE and simple repository rules is a prerequisite for understanding Bzlmod. Some newer features like symbolic macros are also not covered. Learning materials for Bazel go out of date quickly, but even so, we believe that the workshop, now public, is still relevant and can be of use for people who are about to embark on their Bazel journey.